Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Besides the well-known horrific crime of international sex trafficking,

there is another, more common, subversive form of slavery.

This is a life routine, a life style, where a person is forced to work

two minimum wage jobs just to make enough income to survive,

often while going to school to try to achieve more,

to move up, out of their hole, to a place closer to the mythical American dream,

an aspiration that has become more myth than reality.

One American college student writes a clear description of this lifestyle.

This was written as part of a longer essay, in April, 2014:

Everyday someone somewhere is headed
back to a dreadful job with no benefits and very little pay. Statistics shows
that it takes two incomes to maintain the average size household. Providing for
a family now requires a hustle just to maintain the minimum necessities that’s
needed to keep a home at bay. Within a matter of hours, a perfectly well
adjusted human being can be transform to a walking, talking, motorized
robot.This type of hustle requires
maneuvering thought and concentration, but most importantly patience...

The
underpaid and overworked souls are the millions of average Joe workers fighting
just to stay afloat, turning individuals into part-time students and full time
hustle...

The daily set schedules of juggling several 9 to 5 jobs will carry a
burden to many individuals; houses will never become fully functional homes.
The hustle will get harder, and the chains that stop many from reaching certain
heights will get heavier.Juggling will
no longer be an option to many. Crime rate will indeed increase, after robotic
individuals have exhausted all possibilities.This is slavery at its peak...

We must break this cycle and regroup. Houses should be
homes, and families need not to struggle and become mechanical robots. This is
our country—let’s take it back.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

I wrote the Right to Be in relation to individual people--
everyone being free to be who they are.

But the Right to Be also means the right to simply exist.

And this means a nation, a religious group, a race or any other group

connected by a commonality.

A resolve to commit to non-judgment

is a step that upholds the Right to Peace.

Upholding this right also means that we have to push back---

push back against extreme ideas or judgments,

but not all extreme ideas, for some are creative,
only those that thrive on conflict and destruction,

those ideas that destroy the Right to Be.

Although I placed the Right to Be
into the constellation of Free Will Rights,
it really belongs in the constellation of Future Rights,
because as commenter JDF points out,
it is "a battle that will have to be fought for a long time."

Sunday, February 24, 2013

When
James Madison wrote the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, Gouverneur Morris
polished it with the genius phrase “We the People.” Imagine if Madison had blog
commenters who could have made suggestions. What would the Bill of Rights have
become?

Would it have been different?

As a “rightsmaker” blogger, two
years of writing posts declaring over 100 rights has made it clear that
feedback has influenced my thoughts and my writing of these rights. There is no
question that, if the founding fathers had been able to have the help of a
public forum, we would have many more rights than we have now.

Many of us take our rights for granted. But the truth is that Madison was very lucky
to even get the original 10 rights of the Bill of Rights ratified at all.
Between the contentious debates and the summer heat in which the discussions
were held, Madison held his ground, and we have him to thank for holding his
own.

If
only Madison had a blog. His commenters would have come up with so many more
rights than we have. Why? Because the people of 1789 had so many more needs
than the upper-class founding fathers.

Here’s a few.

The
Right to Food. All the founders were farmers. These founders had no desperate, unfilled need for food. Many
had slaves that grew and prepared the food for them. They also didn’t live in a
drought like Oklahoma farmers found themselves in the 1930s.

The
Right to Water. Abundant rivers in America made water plentiful. Americans in
1789 did not live in the desert terrain like much of the people of Africa.

The
Right to Life. Did any of the founding fathers suffer directly from abusive life-threatening
torture or genocide? Why didn't they consider the lives of those who did?

The
Right to Migrate. No one had stopped anyone coming to America in the 1700s, but
surely, a blog commenter of 1789 would have written something about how he had
escaped persecution from where he came, and how America had given him an
opportunity for another life.

So many Americans of that time had used this right. Did the founders just forget thepreservation of this right they had so well used?

The
Right to Security. Well, they almost got this one. The 2nd Amendment
mentions security, but it is mostly interpreted as the Right to Bear Arms. Wouldn’t
someone living in rural America in 1789 have pointed this
out? Civil rights lawyer, Connie Rice, has pointed out in her recent book, Power Concedes Nothing, that the Los
Angeles teen living in a gang neighborhood of the 21st century could
really have used the right to safety more than the right to free speech.

The
Right to Reproduction. How can the human race be without this right protected?
It is highly likely that a women blog commenter in 1789 may have thought this
one up.

The
Right to Body Care. Maybe someone who had been publicly tortured and left with
disabilities for untreated wounds would have anonymously brought this up. Maybe
a husband with a wife who died in childbirth because there was no local doctor
would have suggested this.

So,
the founders had no blogs. But it’s never too late. We can still have these rights.
Can’t we? We the People.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

But the most natural terrain of South Florida is the lesser beauty, the pine rockland.

Characteristic to this geographical area where the tropics meets the temperate zone,

a major element is its very specific kind of soil layer on the Earth's surface.

This habitat is now reduced to 2% of its original, much of it in the Miami area.

It is stripped down to pockets and corridors found on
both land where people live and more rural areas where they don't live.

Pine Rockland

A coalition of several organizations work hard to document the condition of the pine rockland, in an effort and battle to save, protect, and restore it, including
the Institute for Regional Conservation (IRC).

Field biologists gather data which makes a historical documentation of the species living in the pine rockland, about 200 taxa, or named species.
This information guides efforts of conservation and restoration.

Some people live within a pine rockland yard.

About 10 years ago, the IRC went around to educate owners who lived on this type of land, even in less than an acre plot, to convince them to preserve it
rather than knocking it down to make lawns.

Now, a city ordinance makes it illegal to destroy it, but with a lot of money,

a person can still get permission to cut it down and develop the land.
Development and human population growth are the biggest enemy
to the natural pine rockland species.
Their second biggest enemy are "invasive" species.

If you live in this area, an IRC web page offers a zip code entry that gives you

a list of native plant species they encourage you to plant.
Support the Right to Biodiversity!

Update: Commenter AC suggests that "when properties are being sold on endangered land,
they should be informing buyers about the land before they buy."
Sounds like a great idea for a new environmental protection law.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

stating both the Right to Security (which could also have been stated as the Right to Self-Defense) and the Right to Bear Arms in a single Amendment, they are not alone in having made the most common error of rights writing ----combining two or more rights in one Amendment. Another historical declaration of rights, France's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) is also loaded with this same error.

A second error of the U.S. Bill of Rights 2nd Amendment is implying something is a natural born right when it is really a law. Arms are a tool, thus arms ownership is really a law not a right. No one is born with a right to tools like guns, knives, shovels, sticks, cars, or computers. Tools should be governed under laws, whether local, state, federal, or international.

We must not confuse rights with laws.

Rights we are born with; laws we construct.

Revising a right to become a law does not mean it takes away the ability to have or do something. It simply make it more malleable. Humans can make a law allowing or not allowing gun ownership, and with it, the rules of that ownership, such as "Every citizen in the United States may own a gun..."

But as a law, there is space for change of the rules, which a right does not have.

Additionally, constitutional rights are only painfully revised.
Many history books portray the painful process of writing rights, whether in 1789 or 1948, due to contention, disagreement, and lengthy meetings drawn out over weeks, months, or years. Founder and Bill of Rights writer James Madison was so busy fighting for the existence of the Bill of Rights that the very substance of what he wrote was barely revised. Five of 17 Amendments were removed and almost none of his writing was changed. Another element included in the 2nd Amendment, complicating it even more, the right of conscientious objectors was removed (the U.S. could have used that one during the Vietnam War).

No revisions? Almost all writers revise.

Poet Walt Whitman kept revising Leaves of Grass, from its first edition in 1855 to his death in 1892. I have revisited and revised this short blog post four or five times. I have even revised a blog post, on occasion, a year later,
after discovering some new information.

Rights are precious, once declared, so the writing of rights has to be pristine.No one wants their rights touched.
In fact, President Obama had to calm the public
when speaking about guns on Jan.15, 2013, stating that the gun issue
is not about taking away the 2nd Amendment.

"That is not the issue here," Obama clarified during a press conference.

Make no mistake: this blog post is not about whether humans should own guns or not, nor the violence that arms cause. These fall into another rights discussion, either the Right to Life, the Right to Body Care, or even the Right to Biodiversity. This post is about rightsmaking and writing and the result of sloppy or hastily declared rights.

Monday, December 31, 2012

The Freedom of the Press Foundation was formed in December, 2012, with the purpose to protect journalistic freedom, by financially supporting it through crowd funding, that is, people can pay for real knowledge by voluntary donation. This upholds the very media we need most: writers who do investigative journalism and organizations that expose truth through the release of documents.

I can't say enough of how important and celebrated this new, collaborative/partnership non-profit is for lovers of the Right to Free Media. Because, in today's early 21st century world, some news organizations publish unpaid articles written by a variety of celebrity-experts; thus, it becomes marketing, which is fine, except that it's packaged as and called news to an unaware public. Other news publishers buy cheap articles without ever fact-checking the original sources, articles that are continuously cloned and repeatedly distributed, multiplying like gremlins. What is sacrificed is truth, resulting in an unknown and invisible battle to keep our Right to Knowledge and a false documentation of history.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

But others would say that the land, rivers, rocks, are not inanimate but alive.
If the definition of life can be stretched to eco-systems that have elements that interact,
and that living beings' lives depend on these eco-systems,
could not one defend the Right to Earth Rights?

There is movement in this direction.
In 2008, Ecuador voted in a new constitution which included rights
to Ecuador's forests, islands, rivers, and air.

In 2012, in New Zealand, the indigeous Iwi tribe has made sure that their

beloved Whanganui River has gained "personhood."
All actions that relate to this river will consider the best interests of the river.

Bolivia has been an inspiration for Earth Rights.

Bolivia's President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of Bolivia, created the Law of Mother Earth in 2011. The law provides a definition for Earth: "a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings."The law's first article states that humans must "achieve dynamic balance with the cycles and processes inherent in Mother Earth."This law also includes the Right to Water and the Right to Air as two of its seven points.

purple flowers in Utah, United States

In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed April 22 as International Mother Earth Day.
This concept is so new,
that one could say these actions are only the beginning,
seeds that may sprout in 100 years.

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